


Tale of the Desert Muse

by Merfilly



Category: The Mummy Series
Genre: First Meetings, Gen, Pre-Canon, Yuletide, Yuletide 2011
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-01
Updated: 2011-12-01
Packaged: 2017-10-26 18:00:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/286277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merfilly/pseuds/Merfilly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jonathan wants his sister to relax, and they share the tale of how their parents met.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tale of the Desert Muse

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Toastzombie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Toastzombie/gifts).



"Mother would tell you to relax, now wouldn't she?"

The words had about made Evelyn Carnahan jump out of her skin as she was balancing a book on her lap, had another open to the left of the desk, and a third open to the right.

"Jonathan!" She gave him her very best glare over the spectacles she was wearing, trying to be intimidatingly serious at him. "Please, not now! I have to study for this exam, or else I could mess up all my chances to ever be taken seriously in my chosen profession!"

"Oh, mustn't have that now, can we? The great and powerful Librarian must have her peace and quiet to study!" Jonathan announced in his best impersonation of a master of ceremonies, complete with grand, exaggerated motions of his arms.

No matter how irked with him she might become on a regular basis, he was her brother, dear and near to her heart in ways that few could be now that they were on their own. She turned her body away from the study material, dropping the book on her lap. She moved to get it, but Jonathan was quicker, helping since he had brought the mess on. She accepted the book, smiling in exasperation at him.

"One of us must be serious, Jonathan. You go and have the fun while I handle that."

"Evie, that's not fair! Pulling responsibility into it and all!" He looked at the three books, leaning in over her to see. "Sister dear, you know this backwards, forwards, and in Sanskrit."

"Hardly in Sanskrit, brother dear," she replied, adopting his own phrasing for emphasis on his ridiculous claim. "I have to pass the exams, if I am to prove Doctor Bey's sponsorship of me."

Jonathan sighed mightily, then threw his hands up in defeat. "Very well then. I'll just have to save the location of the cache burial I stumbled over for some other time."

The books were forgotten in that very moment, for Evie set the third book on top of the other pair, looking at him with eager delight. "Cache burial? Where? What Dynasty? Oh Jonathan, you didn't disturb anything, did you?"

"Now, Evie, you need to study!"

"Bollocks on the studying! You have found artifacts to catalog and publish?" She reached out and grabbed at his arm, which he smoothly turned into capturing her hand and placing it properly to escort her out of the dusty old museum.

"Plenty of them, and may it enrich us both for some time!" Jonathan reassured her, avarice in his soul as always. She smacked at his upper arm with her free hand, but hastened to go with him.

"You're as bad as mother ever was, Jonathan," she told him with a laugh.

"Remember…"

"…the sarcophagi?" Evie finished, as brother and sister began to laugh together, remembering the exploit that had cemented their father's fascination for their mother.

+*=*+

 _Turn of the Century_

Jonathan Blake Carnahan, late of Her Majesty's Service in the Boer War, discharged honorably and encouraged to maintain his explorations into Africa's vastness, had not truly intended to take up a near-permanent residence in Cairo, Egypt. Granted, the land was fascinating with all of its buried secrets and tangled political climate.

His experience in cartography and general navigation made him a popular man to hire for expeditions into the so-called Valley of Kings. While he had no belief in the hokum of the natives and their views on the curses in the varied tombs found so far, they provided him with interesting rumors and beliefs to annotate on each expedition he accompanied. His familiarity with the working languages of the region made him more popular than many of his countrymen, and he was often sought in the quiet nights after digging, someone to unburden fears to by speaking them aloud.

He was never too busy for such confidences, able to listen even as he drew the painstaking maps from his notes made on edges of the paper in his journal. It was so much his habit that he did not even bother to lift his head upon the entry of a new person into his small tent, as he sketched by the lantern's light.

"What tale is brought to me today, friend?" he asked, speaking the native tongue with the practice of a man who despised not knowing what was said around him.

"I know the tale of the tomb they seek," a softer voice than any he expected replied to him in kind. The fact it was a feminine voice was new and unusual enough to stir the man into looking up. The face peering out from beneath the traditional turban was finely cast, softer in its edges than the men, but still with that hunger and water-lean gauntness of the desert tribes.

Blake, as he was called by one and all, leaned in over the small desk and looked at her with interest. "I would be as a parched man in the desert to hear it, milady, for we have only found contradictory inscriptions so far. Is it a king or a prince we seek?"

"Neither, but it is rich and full of treasures that the ancient robbers never saw to take."

"If not a king or a prince, what? Surely not the fabled Amarna princess? Or some other woman hiding in the Kings' valley instead of among the kins-womens' tombs?"

"Ankhesenpaaten was no fable, good sir, and I know where her sarcophagus lies. When Belzoni explored the tomb near to this dig, he recorded two females and the jars left behind, did he not? There is proof that not all the daughters of the ancients sleep away from the sons."

"Burton mapped that tomb as well," Blake pointed out. "And while it is near to where we dig, surely you cannot mean to tell me that Ankhesenamun was one of those two?"

The woman paused to spit upon the sand at his use of the more accepted Memphite name for the princess. "Please, good sir, do not use that name, for it was cursed in years after the reign of the Heretic's Court."

"Hokum," Blake pointed out slowly, "seems to abound around the tombs, mummies, and artifacts of this valley. Perhaps I'd find the tale of the curse to be more interesting than tales of a Princess that the Hittites and the Egyptians could not agree over the very name of. Or whomever it is you claim to be within this tomb who is neither prince nor king."

"I for one would not wish the modern world to know of the curse upon the woman," she said firmly with a set to her jaw and shoulders that Blake might have called manly were it not for how intriguingly feminine she was. "But, Chronicler, would you not prefer to see, rather than merely listen?"

Blake sat back at that, intrigued by the challenge, and certain it was impossible. Much digging had to be done, but she had mentioned robbers… was their entry into a tomb exposed?

"Why come to me instead of the man who leads the dig?"

The woman smiled, drawing her head scarf up to hide her features, save her eyes. "You care. He does not."

On those words, she swiftly rose, making her way unaided by torch out of his tent, leaving Blake to choose.

"Never could resist trouble disguised by Eve's own form," he muttered in English under his breath before he extinguished his lantern, bringing it and a journal along as he followed the stranger. "At least tell me your name before you lead me off to be bludgeoned by stones and tomb traps!" he called to her, as his longer legs did little to close the distance until she deigned to turn and wait for him.

"Mahera," she answered him, and he committed it to memory. Were she to vanish then and there as nothing but a vaporous delusion of his parched imagination, he was certain he would never forget the name paired with those fascinating eyes peering above the head scarf.

+*=*+

"Why did that tomb remain undiscovered if mother shared it with him that night?" Jonathan wondered as they made their way to his discovery, having told the story back and forth between them.

Evie smiled warmly at her brother, who could only think of the riches that had been found in KV46 a handful of years after their father had been given the tour of it by a spirited Egyptian woman who had no less a sense of adventure than her children now possessed. "Because, my dear brother, while mother loved finding the tombs, she had no interest in removing their contents, save a brooch or two over the years perhaps."

Jonathan snorted. "Father would have reported it, all loyal to the crown and such as he was."

"He did, in time." His sister knew the rest of the story that Jonathan had failed to pay attention to, always losing interest at the very idea of not selling the artifacts to the museum. "Mister Quibbell was a good friend of father's after all. And far more equipped and diligently scholared to make the official discovery."

"Ahh… not much unlike me bringing my finds to you, for you to pass on to Doctor Bey," Jonathan realized. "Tell me he got at least a finder's fee, Evie, or my very soul will fall out of my body and leave me a shambling wreck forever!"

"One only needs to look at your career to see that wreck, big brother," she teased him. "I have no idea, though," she pressed on, speaking over him when he started to take umbrage at her words or possibly explain just why he was ill-suited to being a cartographer or scout or any other appointment that had been procured for him over the years until the untimely loss of their parents. Until he reached majority, though, he had to do what he could to supplement the stipend from the estate they each received. "By then, after all, Father had courted Mother, bartered with her father, and set sail for England with his new bride."

"Ahh yes, the infamous bride-price," Jonathan said, knowing that tale well. "While our worthy grandfather did not outright pay father to take her off his hands, it was a near thing."

That set the siblings to laughing once more, imagining the consternation of both their parents at facing such an indignant affair.

"Do you ever regret that we grew up in England?" Jonathan asked once the laughter subsided. She reached out for his hand, having separated from him for her own ascent of the dunes.

"We are who we are because of choices made, and we'll grow into our own selves by making more. I regret nothing, for I cannot change the past, only explore it!" she declared.

"And so we shall, Evie. So we shall!"

They broke into a run then, laughter lightening the young scholarly woman and her rogue of a brother. Even if the cache proved to be no more than junk, Jonathan had won riches aplenty this night, in reminding Evie of their heritage and erasing the serious lines -- even if only for a night -- from her features.

The stars shone down, much as they had shone over another young pair called to the adventure of the ancient paths.


End file.
